iain writes:
>
> On Mon, 2007-11-12 at 21:07 +0000, Russ Nelson wrote:
> > http://folks.o-hand.com/iain/gypsy/
> >
> > Hi. I'm wondering why you don't mention gpsd in your gypsy
> > documentation. Is there some reason why gpsd doesn't work for you?
> >
>
> http://folks.o-hand.com/iain/why-not-gpsd.html sums it up.
> The reason why this wasn't linked from the homepage was simply
> because I didn't want to be accused of trying to poach
> developers/users from you guys. Let everyone evaluate GPSD vs Gypsy
> on their own terms.
But the fact is that you are poaching, and you have a duty to explain
why. Pretending that an existing standard doesn't exist is sneaky and
under-handed.
Consider that you're making it HARDER to write a GPS application
rather than easier. As it currently stands, a lot of people write
their GPS application so it can read NMEA from a serial device
(/dev/ttyUSB0 or /dev/ttyRFCOMM0) in case gpsd isn't present. If gpsd
is present, they open up the socket write "r\n" to it, and get an NMEA
stream.
So, in order to use gypsy, people have to write a completely different
bit of code to talk to the GPS receiver. And it requires the gypsy
demon to be present. And *it* requires that dbus be present.
To be fair, using the simplified gpsd data stream also requires your
software to rely on gpsd.
Given that the daemon (whichever) needs to parse the incoming NMEA
stream, I'm not sure that not waking up other processes matters much.
Somebody has to expend the cpu cycles to decide whether information
should flow or not. You have a generic method for doing it; not
clearly more efficient than allowing the application to decide for
itself. Doing it in one program or another is just a question of a
syscall. On the ARM processors that most power-stingy devices run on,
syscalls are cheap.
I think that gypsy is a better solution if gpsd wasn't already the
standard. But given that gpsd is THE standard for talking to GPS
receivers, gypsy isn't enough better to justify a switch.
Thus, I will be encouraging people not to support gypsy. Sorry.